Saturday, January 25, 2014

According to a recent CNN poll, 87 percent
of Americans think marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol.
According to an
interview with The New Yorker published
yesterday, President Obama is one of them:

As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view
it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the
cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk
of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than
alcohol.

In fact, Obama said, pot is less dangerous than alcohol "in
terms of its impact on the individual consumer"—a view held by 73
percent of the respondents in that CNN poll. So Obama is not really
going out on a limb by acknowledging that alcohol, measured by
acute toxicity, accident risk, and the long-term effects of heavy
consumption, is more hazardous than marijuana. On the face of it,
he would be taking a bigger risk by endorsing the
theory of evolution.

Yet news outlets around the world are
treating Obama's comment as a big deal, because it contradicts
official U.S. policy. Marijuana is on Schedule I of the
Controlled Substances Act, a category supposedly reserved for drugs
with a high abuse potential that have no recognized medical value
and cannot be used safely, even under a doctor's supervision. The
Obama administration has stubbornly defended
that classification, pretending it is scientifically sound.

Obama also seemed to contradict his own avowed opposition
to decriminalizing marijuana, portraying legalization in Colorado
and Washington as a solution to the racially disproportionate
impact of pot prohibition:

"Middle-class kids don't get locked up for smoking pot, and poor
kids do," he said. "And African-American kids and Latino kids are
more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and
the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties." But, he said, "we
should not be locking up kids or individual users for long
stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those
laws have probably done the same thing." Accordingly, he said of
the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that "it's
important for it to go forward because it's important for society
not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at
one time or another broken the law and only a select few get
punished."

To say that "it's important for [legalization] to go forward" is
a bigger step than the
signals of prosecutorial forbearance the administration has
offered so far. Obama seems to be saying he wants these experiments
to succeed.

In short, Obama is conceding that marijuana prohibition is
unscientific and unjust. That is indeed a pretty big deal, assuming
he does not find a way to wriggle out of it.